The Christmas-Rose
The Christmas-Rose which Helen plucks from the shrub and describes for Gilbert as not smelling as fresh as a summer rose and of surviving through many hardships quite clearly situates the rose a symbolic incarnation for herself.
The Portrait of Arthur
Helen’s painted portrait of her husband Arthur is very palpably a symbol of the physical desire she felt for him which stimulated her ill-conceived decision to marry him.
Fire
During the chapter titled “First Weeks of Matrimony” Helen muses over the status of her husband’s love for her and compares it to a blaze that ignored using twigs with one ignited using coal. The one burns not so brightly, but long and steady; the other much more brightly, but not nearly as long. After pondering that his love may be more like the latter, she tries to dismiss the thought. The correct symbolism is proved true, however.
Director's Cut
Helen is attempting to do something that might well be rendered as similar to a creating a Director’s Cut of her life. Her return to her family home is an attempt to go back to a point earlier in the life before she made the mistake that changed everything and rewrite it the way she envisioned it unfolding. Her adoption of her mother’s maiden name is symbolic of this effort to retell her life in ways that slightly alter the events in a way more acceptable to her.
Wildfell and Grassdale
The two principle residences in the novel are diametrically opposed in symbolic terms. The meaning of “wild” becomes impossibly hard to miss when juxtaposed with the imposition of order, discipline and, ultimately, civilization denoted by “grass.” In Northern England particularly, a “fell” is another word for hill while a “dale” is valley. The symbolism that is orchestrated between the names of the unhappy home from which Helen escapes and the home she runs back toward is one of the more extended examples in the novel.
